Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted the sentence of Ms. Peters, a former county clerk serving a nine-year sentence for her role in a plot to examine voting machines after the 2020 election.
Tina Peters, perhaps the most prominent 2020 election denier who remains behind bars, is set to go free after Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, commuted her sentence on Friday.
The remarkable development cuts short the roughly nine-year sentence that Ms. Peters, a former county clerk in Mesa County, Colo., was given after being convicted in 2024 for her role in a brazen plot to examine voting machines under her control after the 2020 election. Ms. Peters had tried to prove that the machines had been used to rig the contest against President Trump.
In an interview at the Colorado State Capitol, the governor said his commutation was not an attempt to placate Mr. Trump, who has leveled a barrage of funding cuts and policy attacks at Colorado in a hostile effort to free Ms. Peters.
Instead, Mr. Polis said he believed that Ms. Peters, a nonviolent first-time offender, had received too harsh a sentence because of her embrace of conspiracy theories about Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss.
“She committed a crime; she deserves to be a convicted felon,” said Mr. Polis, who noted that he was not pardoning Ms. Peters. But, he added, “she was given an unusually harsh sentence.”
Mr. Polis called Ms. Peters’s beliefs about the 2020 election “dangerously incorrect,” but said they should not have been an element of her original sentencing.
